You probably know by now that AI is the definition of mediocre. As in: it’s the average of everything it’s been trained on. So how do you get beyond average? How do you build a moat?

It certainly doesn’t seem to be via the models. While there are models of the month (hey, Opus 4.6, my new friend!), they seem to be pretty swappable.

So, the model ain’t it. But proprietary data (e.g. an AI that knows you really well), yes! Or doing something really hard in the real world (think: Waymo self-driving cars). Maybe via trust and safety (Anthropic is certainly making a play here). Or... how about via amazing design and good taste.

Remember when ChatGPT first came out and everyone derided “AI wrappers”… well, maybe a wrapper isn’t so bad, assuming you can differentiate on one or more of the above.

Luke Des Cotes is the CEO of MetaLab, the agency famous for designing interfaces, including early versions of Slack and Coinbase, so don’t be shocked when you hear him say that great design can be your moat.

MetaLab is working with a host of AI companies (another shocker), including Windsurf (AI + code), Suno (AI + music), Pika (AI + video), and more…, which is why Luke's take on AI surprised me. He's not rah rah. He's pretty judicious actually. Luke has questions about AI's costs and appropriateness for lots of use cases like those involving kids, but mostly he objects to its mediocrity.

On this episode we discuss what it takes to go beyond.

We also get into:

• Why vibe-coded software isn't changing the world anytime soon
• Why Shopify acquired a design agency right after telling employees to justify their existence against AI
• How MetaLab designers are using AI to prototype in hours instead of weeks
• The talent market for zero-to-one designers — and why they're harder to find than ever
• Landlines, brick phones, and how parents are fighting back against always-on kids

Chapters

• (01:10) - "It's a race to the mean"
• (03:10) - "How do you create emotional resonance?"
• (05:33) - AI companies are burning money
• (08:44) - Speed to good enough
• (13:51) - Is the chat here to stay or a temporary fad?
• (17:43) - It’s hard to find great 0 to 1 design talent
• (22:28) - Seemingly conscious AI
• (25:05) - Kids, landlines, and fighting always-on culture
• (27:21) - Sounds like science fiction, but is here now…

Links & Resources

• Luke Des Cotes on LinkedIn
• MetaLab

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Henrik Werdelin is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He’s founded and incubated several unicorns, most notably BARK, the dog happiness company.

Henrik himself is a pretty happy guy — an optimistic guy who likes to ask what could go right? — and on the day we recorded (a few months ago as I was squirreling away interviews for the podcast relaunch), he helped me see through some future of tech gloom I was feeling. I honestly can’t even remember what Trump+tech hellscape we were living through that week, but I do remember that Henrik put me in a better mood. I think he’ll do the same for you, no matter how you’re feeling. 🤗

Henrik believes AI could be a massive force for good. That is could bring forth a whole new — a better! — form of capitalism. He writes about this is in his latest book, Me, My Customer, and AI. He points to those (like Henry Ford) who took advantage of electricity by making drastic, not incremental, changes to how the build things. Our conversation pairs nicely with my recent episode with Azeem Azhar, who said the AI winners will “come from odd places”, as they have in previous tech transformations.

Here’s more of what Henrik and I cover:

• His concept of "relationship capital"—the moat AI can't clone—and why the companies that win next will be defined by who they serve, not what they make
• The three components of relationship capital: intensity, community, and durability
• The "it sucks that" method for finding problems worth solving (he took it to a fifth grade class; the teacher was not thrilled)
• His vision for the "headless", agentic web, where your startup's MVP is a group of agents, not an app
• The wildly practical AI tools he's built just for himself: a custom CRM that searches by vibes not names, a newsletter bot tuned to his quarterly goals, and an agent that handled his visa paperwork while he was in a meeting
• Why entrepreneurial skills—agency, narrative, resourcefulness—are the ultimate career insurance, whether you start a company or not
• The absolutely ridiculous story of how a prank on a cruise ship led to him meeting his BARK co-founder in a heart-shaped bed

Chapters

• (01:43) - Two Futures: AI Bad vs. AI Really, Really Good
• (05:44) - Why Positivity Is Actually the Riskier Bet
• (09:05) - Electricity, AI, and the Rise of Relationship Capital
• (11:12) - The Three Components of Relationship Capital
• (14:20) - "It Sucks That" — The Best Way to Find a Real Problem
• (19:22) - The Headless Future and Minimum Viable Agents
• (22:40) - N-of-One Software: Building Tools Just for Yourself
• (26:48) - Henrik's Custom Newsletter Bot and AI-Powered CRM
• (30:59) - Warp, Obsidian, and Letting Agents Loose on Your Computer
• (34:45) - Entrepreneurial Skills as Career Insurance
• (36:53) - The Heart-Shaped Bed: How Henrik Met His BARK Co-Founder

Links & Resources

• Henrik Werdelin on LinkedIn
• Audos, Henrik’s latest venture where he hopes AI agents trained in his methods can help thousands of entrepreneurs (donkeycorns!) a year
• Beyond the Prompt podcast, from co-hosts Henrik Werdelin and Jeremy Utley

Support Future Around & Find Out

• Get the free newsletter
• And consider becoming a paid subscriber and help future proof this thing!

Sponsor the show?

• Are you looking to reach an audience of senior technologists and decision-makers? Email me: dan@modernproductminds.com

Is AI conscious? Will it be someday? And should we be nice to it now... just in case?

This FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I dive into the mind-bending world of machine consciousness.

We cover a lot of ground, weaving from the different ways that Luke (co-dependent with R2) and Han (barking commands at C-3PO) treat their droids to whether Pascal’s Wager informs whether we should believe in AI consciousness just in case they do come alive and have been keeping score. (Pascal figured it was the safe bet to believe in God, just in case; maybe we should do likewise?)

That’s from us knuckleheads, but we’ve also got a true expert on consciousness. This week I interviewed Daniel Hulme, one of the world’s leading AI researchers. He’s the Chief AI Officer at WPP, the CEO of Satalia (which WPP bought) and just founded and is CEO of Conscium, which is researching AI consciousness, efficiency (he thinks we’re scaling wrong and LLM’s are not the way), and building a platform to verify AI agents are safe. You’ll hear the first five minutes of my interview with Daniel.

Daniel was not surprised by Moltbook (the Reddit-style site that AI agents built for themselves). That’s because he’s been putting agents together (in a “primordial soup” as he put it) for decades to observe the wild and wonderful ways they behave and to see if they’d create intelligence.

Daniel does not think today’s agents are conscious, but can see a path to it. And he believes that a conscious superintellignece would be safer than a “zombie” one.

But mostly he doesn’t want machines to feel pain and suffer.

Huh???

My brain is still kind of broken from our hourlong chat, which I’m producing now and will be released in a few weeks.

For now, enjoy this preview and more from Kwaku and me as we talk about what we expect from machines, whether we want to be one with them, and more…